Pass the ‘Salt’

In theaters Friday: Hop, Source Code

New on Blu-ray/DVD: All Good Things, Black Swan, Fair Game, Tangled

I can see now how Angelina Jolie prepared so quickly for Salt after original lead prospect Tom Cruise turned down the role: there must have been less than 10 lines of dialogue to memorize, and this cutthroat super spy is the same Jolie we’ve seen in two Lara Croft movies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Wanted already. The accent may be different, but the smoky-eyed attitude and the acrobatics are the same. Fans of 24 and certain Tom Clancy adaptations will find a few things to enjoy here, but only if they can turn off their brains and cross any sense of realism out of the equation.

Jolie plays a secret CIA operative with a specialty in Russian relations and roundhouses. As she prepares to celebrate her wedding anniversary, a Russian defector turns himself over to the CIA claiming he has information the agency needs to act on quickly. Jolie is called in to question that man who spins a story about a secret group of Russian terrorists who kidnap and train young children to later infiltrate the U.S. and wait for opportunities to strike. He claims one such sleeper agent is planning to murder the Russian president on U.S. soil, and her name is Evelyn Salt. Pinned for a crime that hasn’t even occurred yet, Salt breaks out of the CIA before she can be questioned and goes looking for answers of her own.

Helmed by Phillip Noyce, the man responsible for the Harrison Ford-era Clancy thrillers Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger as well as Val Kilmer’s oddly underrated mid-90s spy outing, The Saint, Salt zooms through a twisty espionage plot populated by characters no one can trust. Who is the real villain, the real target, and why is Salt on the run if she truly is innocent?

The film coasts along on a handful of breathless chase sequences—actually the film rarely calms down at all once Salt is on the run—and does a decent job of keeping the audience guessing about Salt’s true intentions. Her minimal dialog even adds to the intrigue in a way. Her endgame is a mystery until the final improbable act.

The problem is we see Salt’s cunning and her bravery, but never her humanity. At times this film goes out of its way to point out her glaring inhumanity, but she never internalizes the consequences of her overly sapped-soul, so any real world repercussions just explode around her like IEDs that never land a hit. Noyce gets the pace just right, but without much substance to Jolie’s character, Salt is one of the few action films that actually begs for a sequel, a continuation of this brisk story that could add more depth to it’s otherwise shallow thrills.